If you're using a laptop you may be familiar with playing videos on Chrome or Chromium sucks the battery pretty quick.
Well, Google Chrome or Chromium are not video players, but they can play almost every video quite well.
And in case of watching youtube or other videos online, no one bothers to play that video with some other software that supports GPU accelerated video playback.
A laptop suffers most by this glitch in browsers, but even if you're on a desktop, you might want to take advantage of your GPU, let the GPU do what it deserved to do.
So, if you're planning to play youtube or other videos efficiently in Chromium browser, this tutorial is for you, let's get started ...
Contents
1. Why is this happening ?
It's simply because lack of proper H.264 decoding support in browsers, hardware accelerated video decoding is disabled in Chrome/Chromium for Linux.
There is another problem, most videos on youtube are encoded with VP9/VP8 codec, but older GPUs can't decode VP8 or VP9 at all, that could be fixed easily with the h264ify Chrome extension.
Though chrome://gpu URL says it can decode videos with GPU if Override software rendering list chrome flag is enabled, but actually it can't, more about this here.
Let's have a look at the chrome://flags URL for the Hardware-accelerated video decode flag. This feature is only available on Mac, Windows and Chrome OS, and there is no way to enable it with default Linux builds.
There is a workaround for this problem too, patch the source to enable chrome VAAPI support and rebuild, or use already patched Chromium builds, the second option is fairly easier.
2. Install Chromium Beta with hardware acceleration enabled
While patching chromium source and compiling it is the best choice for learning, but it's pretty impractical for most. Compiling Chromium from source also requires a descent hardware setup, you might want to check their official instruction.
So If you're running Ubuntu or Debian, why not use prebuilt Chromium Beta from Saikrishna Arcot's PPA ? Here the link to the PPA.
It's pretty simple to installing Chromium Beta with hardware acceleration enabled in Ubuntu,
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-beta sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
You will also need proper GPU drivers for accelerated video decoding, for Intel GPUs install VA-API driver and relate shared libraries.
sudo apt-get install libva-glx1 libva-x11-1 i965-va-driver
Note: I was trying to use VDPAU for decoding videos with NVIDIA Optimus GPUs on Chromium, but that seems to be not possible at this moment.
3. Checking hardware accelerated video decoding capability
Now you can see the Hardware-accelerated video decode flag in enabled and it's available for Linux.
You can confirm that accelerated decoding is working by running a local or online 1080p video encoded with h.264, may be VP9 if your GPU supports decoding that, testing that on the chrome://media-internals URL, Example screenshot below,
Here yo can see video_decoder is GpuVideoDecoder , and the Video codec is avc.
Thoughts, Credits and Conclusion
No doubt that Saikrishna Arcot deserves a warm "thank you" for patching latest Chromium and maintaining the PPAs, excellent work, seriously !!!!
It would be a little better if the Saikrishna fixes the Chromium API key related problem, or completely disabling it.
Hope you all enjoyed this this tutorial, don't forget to share if you think it's helpful.
Hi, this approach is not working anymore in 2020. Is there any updated tutorial? Thank you!
I had install step by step. but video decoder is 'VpxVideoDecoder' always.
Thanks very much for posting this. 1080p30 3mb/s High@L4.1 works great with GPU decoding on my Celeron N3000 which can barely handle 720p30 in software.
Unfortunately Widevine content is still not accelerated. Netflix does work in these builds of Chromium, assuming you change to a Chrome user agent, but rendering is performed in software, even after disabling the GPU whitelist.
I think VA-API is not smart enough to decode widevine encrypted streams.
Unfortunately no! Protected videos are not hardware accelerated and there is no way to do that. 🙁 I'm a maintainer of chromium-vaapi for Fedora.
Glad to know!
I appreciate your contribution for the Linux community.
Thanks Akarshan for the Fedora package. One question. I am using the chromium-beta package from the mentioned ppa. Even though I had no problem with chromium on Fedora on ubuntu after couple of seconds becasue of hardware acceleration youtube page won't open. When I desable hardware decode everything comes back to normal. Where do you think I can report this and have you heard of this issue?
Thank you very much.
FYI, the Chromium API key error message can be hidden with the parameters --disable-infobars
Unfortunately it doesn't seems to work anymore since version 65...
Checked it with a 1080p video, on youtube and from the file:// URL, VA-API decoding is working on Chromium 65.0.3298.3 , Developer Build.
My Desktop PC:- Asus P5KC Intel Q6600 2.4GHz 4Gb RAM DDR3 Geforce GT1030 Lubuntu 64bit Geforce GT1030 driver version:- 390.12
Hi. I am using the right drivers from Linux Lubuntu CPU is 80% to 100% on YouTube 4K video
on YouTube playing on 4K @60fps very high CPU i tried h264ify still lag and very high CPU tried different Internet browser, for example chrome, Firefox, Opera still lag and very high CPU. tried patched chromium still lag very high CPU
i don't have this problem with windows 10 (64bit) on windows 10 64bit CPU usage is 10% or 20% to 30% on YouTube 4K video all web browsers work excellent on windows 10, only problem is Memory (RAM) on windows 10
so that's why i tried Linux Lubuntu
I don't think that VA-API is yet supported with Nvidia cards at least on Linux.
Yeah, Windows tends to perform much better in terms of video decoding on browsers, specially Edge browser.
I've followed these instructions and got it working on my new Dell XPS 13 9360 (i7 8550u) with Ubuntu 16.04.
I can see a reduced cpu usage when watching 1080p on youtube. Sadly, the power consumption is not positively affected currently on my setup. Powertop reports a power consumption of about 15 watts, regardless of accelerated video being active or not. The fan starts to blow after a while.
In Windows with Chrome and Edge the accelerated video is so efficient that the fan doesn't need to blow, even at the highest setting of 2160p. I've verified with the stats for nerds that VP9 was being used.
Does chrome://media-internals show GpuVideoDecoder?
It shows GpuVideoDecoder.
Which codec is used while playing videos on Ubuntu?
Seems like Windows is doing better at least in this case 🙂
Vp9 was used in youtube. At the moment software decoding running at full screen seems to have the lowest power consumption according to powertop (arround 9 watts). In a window its a bit higher. Hardware decoder is arround 15 watts for 1080p vp9.
I noticed that hardware accelerated playback wasn't working with mpv and a vp9 video file. I'll investigate that further:
# mpv --hwdec=vaapi --msg-level=vd=debug out9.webm
[vd] Container reported FPS: 0.000000
[vd] Codec list:
[vd] lavc:vp9 - Google VP9
[vd] lavc:libvpx-vp9 (vp9) - libvpx VP9
[vd] Opening video decoder lavc:vp9
[vd] Not trying to use hardware decoding: codec vp9 is not on whitelist, or does not support hardware acceleration.
[vd] Using software decoding.
[vd] Detected 8 logical cores.
[vd] Requesting 9 threads for decoding.
[vd] Selected video codec: Google VP9 [lavc:vp9]
Unfortunately it doesn't work for me, still FFmpegVideoDecoder. (Debian Testing and HD4600)
The link to kelvins blog ends up on a porn site, btw.
How you installed it on Debian? Downloaded the deb package from the PPA repo?
I think there could be some shared library incompatibility.
Quite unfortunate, the link, removing it.
Yes, I've installed chromium beta from saiarcot895.
Hardware-accelerated video decode is enabled in chrome://flags.
I don't get any error messages on stdout, I've no idea where to start.
To check VAAPI acceleration, run chromium from command line, you should get some output like below in the stdout.
libva info: VA-API version 0.39.0libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_0_39
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
If there's no such output, then maybe some shared library conflict or mismatch. Also install the intel-microcode package, missing microcode could be an issue.
Unfortunately not. I only get an unrelated error message about root certs. Nothing about libva.
vdpau is set up correctly and according to vdpauinfo it is able do decode h264.
Nothing about libva while running chromium from command line?
Here's the problem starts, however I'm clueless.
Note: Chromium can't use VDPAU till now, hardware acceleration depends on VA-API, though there's some word around.
Checked everything with chromium 63 on Ubuntu 16.04.3. it's working fine till now.
Yeah it's weird that I don't get any messages regarding libva on stdout. Everybody seems to get either a positive or an error status message.
Well, thanks anyway for the article and the tips. I think it's important that people are aware of this.
I've reinstalled chromium and now i get at least the VA-API output on startup. But still it doesn't make use of it. Apparently a version mismatch:
"This build of Chromium requires VA-API version 0.39, system version: 0.40"
Thanks again for the feedback, seems like it's a shared library version mismatch related problem.
vainfo output: https://pastebin.com/6jWzSB96
How to install chromium beta on Debian? I try to use "sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-beta" but it seems that can't work on Debian.
You can directly add the PPA repo or download it from here. The Chromium beta channel is more active now.
PPA repo,
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/saiarcot895/chromium-dev/ubuntu xenial mainDownload link,
http://ppa.launchpad.net/saiarcot895/chromium-dev/ubuntu/pool/main/c/chromium-browser/
Let me know if it works with Debian or not.
After fixing NO_PUBKEY issue, chromium-browser still needs a depends package libfontconfig1 (>= 2.11.94) but 2.11.0-6.7+b1 is to be installed on Debian 9 (Stretch).
Yeah, such dependencies related problems are bound to happen, Ubuntu PPAs and Debian stable doesn't mix very well.
Work ingreso in raspberry pi 3 with jessie
I have a question, can I install this Beta version with video decode accelerated on linux with ARM? I have do as floows :
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-beta
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
But my chrome browser still could not enable accelerated video decode.
Thank you.
Hi Tolly,
No you can't do that on ARM hardware, as this hardare decoding process depends on VA-API.
Any ARM SoC doesn't support VA-API till now.
> Here the _link to the PPA_.
The "l" is not part of the link.
Thanks !
My eyes skipped that every time, now fixed it.
Hello,
I have a question about the patch. Using the Chromium Beta with HW Accelators enabled , we will be able to use Intel HW for vpx video streams?
Thank you in advance
Hi George, I've never tested any vpx encoded video on Chromium, as my laptops intel GPU doesn't support VPx decoding.
But I beleive it's NOT possible yet, VPx codec implementation on Intel GPU is fairly recent, even Intel based chromebooks depends on CPU to decode VP9 streams.
If you have the hardware, then please give it a try and share your results here.
Reference:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/4j8jun/does_chromeos_support_hardware_decoding_for_vp9/
https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/4mfdy9/do_chromebooks_use_hardware_acceleration_vaapi_to/
Well, I just noticed that the video that causes the high cpu load is encoded with VP9 which apparently can't be decoded by my GTX 860m. So screw what I wrote above, the hardware acceleration should work after activating the flag. Also it would be helpful if comments on here could be edited 😀
Hey, thanks for the feedbacks.
I doubt that any optimus GPU could be used for hardware accelerated video decoding in chrome.
Latest intel GPUs can decode vp9, but i think it's not implemented in chrome yet.
And thanks for the tip, I should implement editable commants.
You can just go to chrome://flags and enable the flag "Override software rendering list". That activates hardware acceleration too! 🙂 I think it would be nice if you'd update your post to include this because at first I really thought I'd have to use the PPA and Chromium Beta.
Well, it seems like I've been glad too early - chrome://gpu shows that Video Decode and VPx Video Decode is enabled but my CPU usage still goes up to 60% when watching a YouTube video 🙁 But maybe my solution works for others. I'm using a latop with iGPU and a dedicated gpu (Nvidia GTX 860m) so that might be why it still doesn't work.
I meant that Video Decode and VPx Video Decode is Hardware accelerated according to chrome://gpu. Apparently it still isn't though :/
No. If u use only "Override software rendering list" then HW decoding won't work for u but you can see that HW is enabled but trust me its not. You need for this manually compiling Chromium with patch for VAAPI support or use ppa for Ubuntu maintained by Saikrishna Arcot. Then all should work and "Override software..." should be enabled in default.
Soon should be release official Chrome/Chromium with VAAPI but this only as experiment and then you need manually enabled special vaapi decode flag in chrome:flags but I think we need wait two or three more chromium/chrome version.
Fabulous!
Hi Arnab, if i am tring to use this on a system with NVIDIA card, should it work? Both vainfo and vdpauinfo have correct output but in Chromium, every file i throw at it is decoded with ffmpegvideodecoder. Also the flags are properly set.
Accelerated video decoding (h.264 and vp9) on Chromium is a mixed success, it works for few people while refuses to work for some.
If you NVIDIA card is Optimus, then it's not supported at all, unfortunately my NVIDIA GPU is Optimus, so I cant even test it.
Anyway if you can get it work, please don't forget to notify me.
So I'm still not getting gpuvideodecoder on media-internals. It's showing either vpxvideodecoder on youtube, or ffmpegvideodecoder on twitch. Performance seems to be better but I'm wondering if I'm not fully utilising my GPU. I notice sometimes, my GPU will go back to low performance and 60 fps videos will drop to 30 fps.
Thanks ! Chrome behaves really weird in Linux.
May be your GPU supports both H.264 and VP9 decoding, and chrome is choosing VP9.
And I've no idea about what is twitch, just heard the name.
It shows VPX decoder because your browser prefer VP9 instead h264. You need use h264ify addon to disable VP9, then your browser start prefer H264 and then you should see GPUVideodecoder. Worth to add VP9 is not hardwared acceleration on Linux still (only for new NVIDIA GPU on Windows but this also with many issues).
So for now stay with h264.